Prosecutors recommend 10 years of imprisonment for Mt.Gox’s former CEO Mark Karpeles

Japanese prosecutors on Wednesday, proposed a 10-year prison on Mt.Gox’s former CEO, Mark Karpeles, on embezzlement of about 340 million Yen or $3 million.

According to Nikkei Asian Review, Karpeles repeatedly denied his involvement in embezzlement of funds, explaining the amount was to be utilized for temporary loan and “used the money for business acquisitions and paying rent.”

The exchange platform was launched in 2010, but all of a sudden shut its doors without issuing any prior notice; the investors were startled and left without any access to their Bitcoin funds stored on the platform.

During the September-December 2013, Mt.Gox had announced that almost 850,000 BTC went missing or likely stolen, at that time the value of these coins was more than USD 450 million.

Later, 200,000 BTC were found before the exchange filed for bankruptcy; the exchange managed to sell cryptocurrencies when the market for Bitcoins was witnessing a rise. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2014, a total of 48 billion yen or $423 million worth of bitcoins and 2.8 billion Yen worth of cash was disappeared.

In 2014, The Tokyo District Court had placed Mt.Gox into proceedings of bankruptcy. Japan is not the only country, Karpeles is having troubles with. Karpeles faced lawsuits from former employees of the now-bankrupt bitcoin exchange from the U.S.

Karpeles, along with his lawyers argued that the US court had no personal jurisdictions and demanded that the lawsuit be dismissed.

The victims of the hack were given time until October 22nd of this year to file for rehabilitation claims, either through online or offline; the process was started from the month of June.

The notice was published in a Q&A document by Mt.Gox addressing the Civil Rehabilitation Launch, an answer from the announcement says,

“The planned deadline for the Rehabilitation Trustee to submit a statement of approval or rejection to the court is January 24, 2019, but, at the current point in time, a definite date has not been determined.” The update on the situation is yet to be addressed.

Mt.Gox’s next meeting is scheduled for March 20th of 2019. Prior to the meeting, to validate Proof of rehabilitation claims, the date is set from January 31st to February 7th of 2019.

The victims of the scam predict the amount to be reimbursed by mid-2019.

Will the amount be rolled out or not? This time we feel it is going to be a win situation for the victims, as the court rejected the extension of deadline requested by Mt.Gox’s trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi. The deadline was to extend from October to December, for the filing of civil rehabilitation claims.